Sessions

Presented by Morten Rand-Hendriksen in Room C300 (Theatre), Room C400.

Some thoughts on WordPress, the Web, and Everything Else.

Presented by Morten Rand-Hendriksen in Room C300 (Theatre).

The web has evolved, and now it’s time our themes do the same. WP Rig is an evolution on the tried and true starter theme model: a modern build process and WordPress starter theme bundled together, created to simplify the process of building advanced, accessible, performant, progressive themes. WP Rig does the heavy lifting of optimization so developers can focus on what they do best: designing and building great user experiences. In this talk you’ll learn how to supercharge your theme development process with WP Rig.

Presented by Debra Williams in Room C400.

Divi, by Elegant Themes, is truly a game changer. If you’re a non-programmer, this will give you the ability to create anything you can imagine without writing a line of code. Divi comes with 46 different customizable content elements that you can mix and match to create original, responsive and beautiful designs. The Visual Editor allows you to edit content in-line; highlight text and change its style; change the width or height of a container by dragging its edges and drag and drop content.

Presented by Mike Demo in Room C300 (Theatre).

When you launch a website, do you know what works? You don’t; you’re guessing. Your guesses may be based on experience and education, but with good A/B testing you can also make decisions based upon data.

For example, do you know that even the way a duck’s face points (left versus right) could increase your conversions by 40%? As a case study, one of our clients, an insurance company, increased leads by making just a small 2px change.

In this talk, we will spend some time review the A/B checklist I personally use to guide you on your journey to discover what things to test, testing methodology, and the best tools to use for your clients sites.

Presented by Eoin O’Dwyer in Room C400.

Gutenberg is the planned new content editor for WordPress 5.0. It is going to radically change how we enter content and develop in WordPress, and it has generated a lot of controversy. What’s good, what’s bad, and what’s ugly in the Gutenberg editor? Where do we go from here?

Presented by Ainslie Koopmans in Room C400.

Copyright infringement is an area of the law that affects all website owners and content creators, yet is widely misunderstood. There are a lot of threats thrown around when an image or text is copied as well as common misconceptions about how to share content. Website owners are often threatened with lawsuits and large fines for using a non-original image or text, even after they seemingly used the content properly.

Because of this, I would like to demystify copyright: to examine and clarify copyright infringement.

Some of the topics I will cover include:

– What is the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and how it affects content creators and website owners
– Distinguishing what is and is not copyrightable
– Knowing your rights
– What content you can and cannot use
– What to do if your content has been stolen
– What to do if someone has filed a DMCA notice (or threatened a lawsuit) against you

I am excited to share what I have learned working in copyright infringement, so that WordPress users can not only add content to their sites with confidence, but also protect what they have created under copyright law.

Presented by Shannon Smith in Room C300 (Theatre).

In 2018, WordPress will modernize, streamline, and simplify the content creation experience with Gutenberg. It represents the biggest change to the WordPress user experience in several years.

This session will teach just enough React for theme and plugin developers to start using Gutenberg today. Colour palettes, meta boxes, reusable blocks: all the new features, made easy.

Presented by Christina Varro in Room C400.

Being a freelancer, contractor or digital nomad is all the rage nowadays, but you don’t want to just survive doing what you love, you want to thrive! Learn strategies for building reoccurring income, business systems, sales automation and other tools to better manage your freelance business. I have been a freelance digital media expert of almost 10 years, and want to share my experience of what it takes to succeed outside of a 9-5 job for the long term.

Presented by Chloe Chamberland & Colette Chamberland in Room C300 (Theatre).

Everyone knows their site needs to be secure. But, just what does it take to make sure your site is optimally secure from compromise? In this workshop, whether you’re advanced or just starting out, we will help walk you through virtually every step it takes to make sure your WordPress environment is secure. We will start out with basics like what is security and general concepts about security. From there, we will walk you through selecting a secure hosting provider and choosing a secure password. Finally, we will go into more specific configuration details and the do’s and don’ts when securing your WordPress environment. By the time you walk out of this workshop you should feel like a WordPress security pro.

Presented by Michael R. Hunter in Room C400.

Building an agency is tough. But, it’s even harder when you’re doing it the wrong way. Just like anything in life, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do build an agency. This session will talk about how to move from the do-it-all yourself, stressful life of a freelancer, to building an agency that can easily generate multiple 6-figures and above.

Presented by Matt Kopala in Room C300 (Theatre).

Speed matters. People are impatient. If your website or a client’s website doesn’t load quickly – within a just a couple of seconds – many visitors will abandon it completely. A slow site means lost time & revenue. But figuring out how to speed up a slow site can be HARD. Everyone’s got a suggestion and an idea for how to fix your performance issues, but most are just guesses, and not based on real data. STOP GUESSING. If you have a performance issue, or just want a faster site, you need to KNOW exactly what is slowing things down, and how to fix it. This talk will show you how.

Presented by Sydney Hake in Room C400.

This talk will emphasize the importance of team collaboration in projects and how it can save time during different project phases as well as contribute to a well balanced team dynamic. We will explore what this looks like when building a WordPress website and some important takeaways to maintain a collaborative workflow.

Presented by Carrie Forde in Room C300 (Theatre).

With the rise of React in WordPress, there are more and more developers turning to Webpack for managing front end assets. In this talk, I’ll cover Webpack at a high level (what it is, and why we might reach for it), and show you how you can unleash the power of Webpack in your WordPress projects to manage and bundle front end assets.

Presented by Ryan Chmura in Room C300 (Theatre).

My professors always told me never to run more than 7-8 plugins at a time, but real-world scenarios don’t always play out how they would in the classroom. Join me as I share a few of my learning curves jumping from a classroom environment to a job that I was arguably underqualified for.

Presented by Rebeca Godin in Room C400.

How to use your WordPress site with various digital marketing plugins to help grow your business.

Presented by Larry Swanson in Room C400.

WordPress agencies and freelance designers and developers can improve their client’s website projects by incorporating content-strategy best practices into their workflows. Anyone who has built more than one website has developed a good array of content strategy skills. I’ll show how to plug those skills into a proven framework for crafting an actionable, state-of-the-art website content strategy. If you’ve ever used “lorem ipsum” copy as you struggled to extract content from your client the day before launch, this talk is for you.

Presented by Kirsten Starcher in Room C300 (Theatre).

Whether it’s a single line of wayward CSS that just won’t style right or the dreaded white screen of death bringing down your entire site, having the right approach to debugging is half the battle. Attendees will gain an understanding of how to break a programming problem down into smaller, bite-sized pieces, and learn the likely trouble spots for issues with their WordPress sites.

Presented by Dale McGladdery in Room C300 (Theatre).

Have you ever needed to move your website from one URL to another, create a test site, or change from http to https? It’s a pain. There are plugins and services for this, but they’re often overkill, don’t quite do it the way you want it done, or may not be cost beneficial.

There’s another way.

The WordPress WP-CLI tool gives you a zero cost option for change your website URL and moving your website. If you’re comfortable using command line tools, or want to learn, this presentation gives a step-by-step process to copy a WordPress site from one host to another. At the end of session you’ll be able to create a test version of your website without buying or installing a plugin, and keep that site up-to-date. You’ll also be able to change the URL of an existing site.

We’ll also touch on creating a local version of your website on your computer and installing WP-CLI, the WordPress command line tool.

Presented by Jamie Schmid in Room C300 (Theatre).

Have you ever updated your WordPress site or plugins, and suddenly found yourself looking at The White Screen of Death? What you thought was going to be a routine update has just brought down your entire website, and the panic sets in fast. If this is your live website, that can quickly translate to loss of revenue, customer trust, and a lot of time and money down the drain. Not to mention the very bad day you are about to have.

In this talk I will cover tips and strategies for keeping your site updated safely, and how to avoid breaking your live site through use of a staging site that runs alongside your live website. Big content changes, updates, and trying out new designs increases the potential for disaster when these changes are made directly to your live website. Fortunately, there are many options for creating and managing a staging site, ranging from the most simple click-to-push, to more complex solutions integrated into a developers’ workflow. I will show you how to set up your very own staging server in a few different ways, so you can push that Update button without putting your live site in jeopardy.